Watch Herbie Hancock Demo a Fairlight CMI Synthesizer on Sesame Street (1983)

in Music | October 22nd, 2012

Rea­son num­ber 1,834,334 to love the inter­net: a clip from a 1983 episode of Sesame Street star­ring Her­bie Han­cock demon­strat­ing the Fairlight CMI syn­the­siz­er to a group of kids, includ­ing a very young Tatyana Ali (who grew up to play Ash­ley Banks on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air). The Fairlight CMI (Com­put­er Music Instru­ment) was a syn­the­siz­er and sam­pler with 28 megabytes or more of mem­o­ry, used by a ros­ter of clas­sic elec­tron­ic artists like Jean-Michel Jarre, Jan Ham­mer, Art of Noise, and Depeche Mode, to name only a few.

And, of course, by Her­bie Han­cock, one of the first jazz pianists to embrace elec­tron­ic key­boards (and who’s also been known to rock a key­tar). The Fairlight, pro­duced in sev­er­al ver­sions between 1979 and 1985 by an Aus­tralian (!) com­pa­ny, was state-of-the-art for its time. In this clip, its oper­a­tion appears to be a two man job, since Han­cock is backed by an engi­neer, Clive.

In anoth­er demon­stra­tion of the Fairlight’s capa­bil­i­ties (below), however–from hard-to-find doc­u­men­tary I Love Quin­cy–Her­bie works alone. Well, almost. He’s joined by Quin­cy Jones, just kind of hang­ing out while Han­cock does his thing. Jones says the sounds Han­cock makes on the syn­the­siz­er are like “sculpt­ing… tak­ing a pure elec­tric sig­nal and sculpt­ing it into some­thing of beau­ty.” Worth not­ing in the video: this ver­sion of the Fairlight incor­po­rat­ed a touch­screen mon­i­tor, with a sty­lus to allow the engi­neer to high­light and select oper­a­tions. Watch Her­bie demon­strate the Fairlight’s capa­bil­i­ties as a syn­the­siz­er, sam­pler, and sequencer. As fas­ci­nat­ing as music nerds will find this, those fans out there who aren’t gear­heads should still appre­ci­ate these ear­ly clips of Han­cock, whether hors­ing around with the Sesame Street kids or geek­ing out in the stu­dio with Quin­cy Jones.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Her­bie Han­cock Is Now Teach­ing His First Online Course on Jazz

All Hail the Beat: How the 1980 Roland TR-808 Drum Machine Changed Pop Music

Her­bie Han­cock: All That’s Jazz. A Doc­u­men­tary

via Dan­ger­ous Minds

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

Watch Scarlet Street, Fritz Lang’s Censored Noir Film, Starring the Great Edward G. Robinson (1945)

in Film | October 19th, 2012

A mil­que­toast cashier. A schem­ing pros­ti­tute. Her even hard­er-schem­ing boyfriend. The mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion of art. A faked death. A sud­den, very real, mur­der. All of these hard noir ele­ments find their way into Scar­let Street, Fritz Lang’s ini­tial­ly dis­missed but sev­er­al times re-eval­u­at­ed 1945 crime pic­ture. We remem­ber the Aus­tri­an auteur, and right­ly so, for such immor­tal pieces of ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry Euro­pean cin­e­ma as Metrop­o­lis, M, and the Dr. Mabuse tril­o­gy.

But from the mid-thir­ties onward, Lang direct­ed Eng­lish-lan­guage films pro­lif­i­cal­ly, often using nov­els as source mate­r­i­al. You can watch Scar­let Street, a work from that peri­od which has drawn more and more cinephilic atten­tion since its release, free online. Star­ring Edward G. Robin­son as a cloth­ing-store clerk and hap­less part-time painter along­side Joan Ben­nett as his work­ing-girl object of frus­trat­ed desire, the film appeared as the sec­ond adap­ta­tion of Georges de La Fouchardière’s book La Chi­enne, the first hav­ing come from Jean Renoir.

“An uncom­pro­mis­ing sub­ver­sive remake,” crit­ic Den­nis Schwartz calls Scar­let Street, “with a par­tic­u­lar­ly acute Amer­i­can accent.” In Cin­e­ma Jour­nal, Matthew Bern­stein called it “dense, well-struc­tured film noir.” But the pic­ture came in for a crit­i­cal drub­bing at first: the New York Times’ Bosley Crowther called it “a slug­gish and man­u­fac­tured tale,” and Time bemoaned its “painful­ly obvi­ous sto­ry.” But what­ev­er the argu­ments about the movie’s artis­tic mer­it, it clear­ly touched a nerve with the New York State Cen­sor Board, who banned it on grounds that it “would tend to cor­rupt morals.“ ‘ The city cen­sor of Atlanta cit­ed “the sor­did life it por­trayed, the treat­ment of illic­it love, [and] the fail­ure of the char­ac­ters to receive ortho­dox pun­ish­ment from the police,” call­ing it “licen­tious, pro­fane, obscure and con­trary to the good order of the com­mu­ni­ty.” Does Scar­let Street retain its pow­er to shock? Did Lang craft it with a com­plex­i­ty and ele­gance not obvi­ous to Amer­i­can audi­ences of the mid-for­ties? Click play and find out for your­self.

Scar­let Street appears in our col­lec­tion of Free Film Noir Movies and our larg­er col­lec­tion of 500 Free Movies Online

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch The Hitch-Hik­er by Ida Lupino (the Only Female Direc­tor of a 1950s Noir Film)

Orson Welles’ The Stranger: Watch The Full Movie Online

Watch D.O.A., Rudolph Maté’s “Inno­v­a­tive and Down­right Twist­ed” Noir Film (1950)

Google Brings History to Life with 42 New Online Exhibitions

in Google | October 17th, 2012

Ear­li­er this year, Google expand­ed Art Project, a vast col­lec­tion of art­work curat­ed into exhibits by real muse­ums around the world and by reg­u­lar folks like you and me. (See our orig­i­nal post here.) Not much lat­er the Nel­son Man­dela Archive went online, fea­tur­ing rare pho­tos, man­u­scripts and videos relat­ed to the civ­il rights leader. And, more recent­ly we brought you news about Google’s World Won­ders Project, which includes amaz­ing panoram­ic shots of coral reefs pro­duced in col­lab­o­ra­tion with a major ocean­ic study.

Turns out that these projects were just a taste of what was to come. With 17 dif­fer­ent cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions as part­ners, Google has built a robust, umbrel­la Cul­tur­al Insti­tute to house 42 new online exhi­bi­tions. Each exhib­it fea­tures, in Google’s words, “a nar­ra­tive which links the archive mate­r­i­al togeth­er to unlock the dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives, nuances and tales behind these events.” The exhibits also ben­e­fit from an abun­dance of poignant human sto­ries.

The Auschwitz-Birke­neau State Muse­um, for exam­ple, pro­vid­ed mate­ri­als for the exhib­it Trag­ic Love at Auschwitz, which fol­lows the rela­tion­ship between a Jew­ish woman and a Pol­ish man, both pris­on­ers of the Nazis. You can also watch the only exist­ing film images of Anne Frank, part of the thought­ful and touch­ing Anne Frank exhib­it. Or expe­ri­ence an entire­ly dif­fer­ent exhib­it, Years of Dolce Vita, which rev­els in the sen­su­al­i­ty of Ital­ian film from the mid-cen­tu­ry. Cre­at­ed in part­ner­ship with an Ital­ian gov­ern­ment film insti­tute, Google’s exhib­it is a sun­ny romp through the archi­tec­ture, fash­ion and food of post-Cold War Italy.

Oth­er exhibits focus on Steve Biko, The Coro­na­tion of Queen Eliz­a­beth II, and D‑Day. Enter the full col­lec­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Google Releas­es “Course Builder,” an Open Source Plat­form for Build­ing Your Own Big Online Cours­es

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal cul­ture, teach­ing and high­er edu­ca­tion. Vis­it her work online at .

Visit the World of Little Nemo Artist Winsor McCay: Three Classic Animations

in Animation, Film | October 17th, 2012

If you stopped by Google’s home­page Mon­day, even for a moment, you sure­ly caught the incred­i­ble, ani­mat­ed doo­dle above, made in homage to car­toon­ist and ani­ma­tor Win­sor McCay (1869–1934). The occa­sion was the 107th anniver­sary of what has proved to be McCay’s most loved and endur­ing com­ic strip, Lit­tle Nemo in Slum­ber­land. Some­thing of a god­fa­ther to the philo­soph­i­cal whim­sy of car­toon­ists like Bill Wat­ter­son and Chris Ware, McCay’s com­ic art dom­i­nat­ed the car­toon genre in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry with strips like Nemo, Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend, and Lit­tle Sam­my Sneezes.

Google’s approach was to bring him into the 21st cen­tu­ry with a doo­dle that adapt­ed his style for the web. Chief doo­dler Jen­nifer Hom says, “we want­ed his style def­i­nite­ly… and his col­or palettes, but we also want­ed to take it from the per­spec­tive of how it would look if he designed it for the inter­net.” That’s all very well, but it became clear to me when perus­ing the online com­men­tary that many, many peo­ple do not know McCay’s work at all, nei­ther his style nor his col­or palettes. And after see­ing this doo­dle, many peo­ple want­ed to. I couldn’t rec­om­mend enough pick­ing up an edi­tion of McCay’s com­ic art. Below is a brief sur­vey of some of McCay’s finest work as an ani­ma­tor.

McCay got his start work­ing a “Dime Museum”—part amuse­ment park, part vaudeville—in Detroit, draw­ing por­traits of cus­tomers for 25 cents a piece. Dur­ing this time, he devel­oped his abil­i­ty to draw amaz­ing­ly fast, which served him well as a car­toon­ist but also played an impor­tant role in his work as an ani­ma­tor. Ear­ly-20th cen­tu­ry ani­ma­tion was, of course, drawn entire­ly by hand; unlike large stu­dios like Dis­ney, McCay did almost of the draw­ing him­self with occa­sion­al assis­tance. For the very pop­u­lar 1914 short film, “Ger­tie the Dinosaur” (below), McCay cre­at­ed 10,000 draw­ings in six months. Watch McCay him­self act the vaude­vil­lian impre­sario as he presents the mis­chie­vous Ger­tie, a very ear­ly exam­ple of live-action com­bined with ani­ma­tion.

As you can see above, McCay had a knack for show­man­ship. He went on vaude­ville tours with his short films, pre­sent­ing lec­tures on ani­ma­tion. While Ger­tie was a cre­ation made specif­i­cal­ly for film, much of McCay’s oth­er ani­ma­tions fea­tured char­ac­ters from his beloved com­ic strips. One of those comics, Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend began the theme McCay would take up in Lit­tle Nemo, the strange, unset­tling, unpre­dictable world of dreams. This strip, how­ev­er, had no recur­ring char­ac­ters. In each “episode,” dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters expe­ri­enced some sort of bizarre or night­mar­ish fan­ta­sy after eat­ing Welsh rarebit, a cheese-on-toast dish. The strip catered to adults, express­ing grown-up anx­i­eties and fan­tasies, and spawned a live-action film in 1906 by Edwin S. Porter. McCay him­self ani­mat­ed four “Rarebit” dreams: How a Mos­qui­to Oper­ates in 1912 and The Pet, Bug Vaude­ville, and The Fly­ing House (below) in 1921. For con­trac­tu­al rea­sons, McCay drew the strip under the name “Silas,” hence the cred­it to “Silas” Win­sor McCay in the film.

The short film below brings togeth­er char­ac­ters from McCay’s beloved Lit­tle Nemo strip. One com­menter writes, the Google doo­dle “brought me here, and I am so hap­py it did.” McCay’s work tends to have that effect; his play­ful style, his elas­tic imag­i­na­tion and rev­er­ence for dream-log­ic, are irre­sistible (despite some dat­ed, stereo­typ­i­cal depic­tions). In this short film, the Nemo char­ac­ters per­form a num­ber of strange feats. Miss­ing only here is Nemo him­self, the boy-dream­er. Per­haps we, the audi­ence, are him, watch­ing our sub­con­scious dance on the screen.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

Leonard Cohen Plays a Spellbinding Set at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival

in Film, Music | October 10th, 2012

Jimi Hen­drix was a tough act to fol­low under the best of cir­cum­stances. But to fol­low him onstage after mid­night in front of a crowd of more than half a mil­lion peo­ple that had been set­ting fires and throw­ing bot­tles at the stage seemed like an impos­si­ble task for a poet with an acoustic gui­tar and a gen­tle band of back­ing musi­cians. Yet Leonard Cohen turned the volatile sit­u­a­tion at the 1970 Isle of Wight Fes­ti­val into one of the most mag­i­cal per­for­mances of his career.

A lit­tle piece of land four miles off the south­ern coast of Eng­land, the Isle of Wight was host to three great music fes­ti­vals from 1968 to 1970. The last of these was some­thing of a cross between Wood­stock and Alta­mont: flower pow­er with an under­cur­rent of men­ace. Like the Wood­stock fes­ti­val the year before, the 1970 Isle of Wight fes­ti­val was crashed by thou­sands of unpay­ing fans.

Head­lin­ers for the five-day fes­ti­val includ­ed Hen­drix, Miles Davis, the Who and the Doors. By the time Cohen appeared–near the very end of the rainy final night–the atmos­phere had become dan­ger­ous. Dur­ing the Hen­dix per­for­mance, some­one threw a flare onto the top of the stage and set it on fire. Jour­nal­ist Sylvie Sim­mons describes the scene in her new book, I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen:

Ten­sion had been ris­ing at the fes­ti­val for days. The pro­mot­ers had expect­ed a hun­dred and fifty thou­sand peo­ple but half a mil­lion more turned up, many with no inten­tion of pay­ing. Even after the pro­mot­ers were forced to declare it a free fes­ti­val, ill will remained. Dur­ing a set by Kris Kristof­fer­son, bot­tles were thrown and he was booed off­stage. “They were boo­ing every­body,” says Kristof­fer­son. “Except Leonard Cohen.”

As Cohen and his pro­duc­er and key­board play­er Bob John­ston stood watch­ing the may­hem dur­ing Hen­drix’s per­for­mance, Cohen stayed calm. “Leonard was­n’t wor­ried,” John­ston told Sim­mons. “Hen­drix did­n’t care and nei­ther did we. Leonard was always com­plete­ly obliv­i­ous to any­thing like that. The only thing that upset him was when they told him that they did­n’t have a piano or an organ–I don’t know, some­one had set them on fire and pushed them off the stage–so I could­n’t play with him. Leonard said, ‘I’ll be in the trail­er tak­ing a nap; come and get me when you’ve found a piano and an organ.’ ”

Accord­ing to most accounts it was a lit­tle after two o’clock in the morn­ing when Cohen took the stage. His back­up band, or “Army,” includ­ed John­ston on key­boards, Char­lie Daniels on fid­dle and bass, Ron Cor­nelius on lead gui­tar and Elkin “Bub­ba” Fowler on ban­jo and bass, along with back­up singers Cor­lynn Han­ney, Susan Mus­man­no and Don­na Wash­burn. Cohen had a glazed-over look in his eyes through­out the per­for­mance, the result of his tak­ing the seda­tive Man­drax. “He was calm because of the Man­drax,” John­ston told Sim­mons. “That’s what saved the show and saved the fes­ti­val. It was the mid­dle of the night, all those peo­ple had been sit­ting out there in the rain, after they’d set fire to Hen­drix’s stage, and nobody had slept for days.”

The his­toric per­for­mance was cap­tured on film by Mur­ray Lern­er, who released it in 2009 as Leonard Cohen: Live at the Isle of Wight 1970. The film (above) includes the fol­low­ing songs from the show:

1. Dia­monds in the Mine
2. Famous Blue Rain­coat
3. Bird on the Wire
4. One of us Can­not be Wrong
5. The Stranger Song
6. Tonight Will be Fine
7. Hey, That’s No Way to Say Good­bye
8. Sing Anoth­er Song Boys
9. Suzanne
10. The Par­ti­san
11. Seems So Long Ago, Nan­cy
12. So Long, Mar­i­anne (dur­ing clos­ing cred­its)

Per­haps the most mov­ing moment in the film comes at the begin­ning, when Cohen brings the mas­sive crowd togeth­er by ask­ing a favor: “Can I ask each of you to light a match,” Cohen says, “so I can see where you all are?” As Sim­mons puts it, “Leonard talked to the hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple he could not see as if they were sit­ting togeth­er in a small dark room.” Or as film­mak­er Lern­er lat­er said, “He mes­mer­ized them. And I got mes­mer­ized also.” Sum­ming up the con­cert and the film, Sim­mons writes: “It was a bril­liant per­for­mance. Lern­er’s cam­eras cap­tured Cohen’s com­mand­ing pres­ence, hyp­no­tist’s charm, and an inti­ma­cy that would seem unfea­si­ble in such a vast, inhos­pitable space.”

Orson Welles Remembers his Stormy Friendship with Ernest Hemingway

in Film, Literature | October 9th, 2012

In this fas­ci­nat­ing clip from a 1974 inter­view by Michael Parkin­son of the BBC, Orson Welles describes his “very strange rela­tion­ship” with Ernest Hem­ing­way, cast­ing him­self in a sto­ry of their first meet­ing as a torero opposed to Hem­ing­way’s bull.

The two men met in New York in the ear­ly sum­mer of 1937, when Welles was asked to nar­rate The Span­ish Earth, a doc­u­men­tary orga­nized by Hem­ing­way and oth­er artists to pro­mote the Rebubli­can cause dur­ing the Span­ish Civ­il War. Welles was a great admir­er of Hem­ing­way, who was 16 years his senior. When he was 18 years old he went to Spain to study bull­fight­ing after read­ing Hem­ing­way’s Death in the After­noon. But despite some sim­i­lar­i­ties, the two men were poles apart, as Welles’ anec­dote of their first meet­ing sug­gests.

The brava­do in Welles’s sto­ry may have some­thing to do with a need to com­pen­sate for his own injured pride over the recep­tion of his nar­ra­tion for The Span­ish Earth.  Under pres­sure from Lil­lian Hell­man and oth­ers in the project, who com­plained that Welles’ per­for­mance was too the­atri­cal for the doc­u­men­tary, direc­tor Joris Ivens decid­ed to scrap it and asked Hem­ing­way to come back in to read his own words. Welles lat­er drew on the inci­dent in the pro­jec­tion room as inspi­ra­tion for his script “The Sacred Beasts,” about the rela­tion­ship between a young bull­fight­er and an old­er film direc­tor. The script was even­tu­al­ly devel­oped into The Oth­er Side of the Wind, an unfin­ished film star­ring John Hus­ton as the Hem­ing­way-inspired film­mak­er Jake Han­naford. Welles was work­ing on the project when the inter­view with Parkin­son took place. You can see the com­plete inter­view on YouTube, and read a tran­script at Wellesnet.

via 3 Quarks Dai­ly

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Span­ish Earth, Writ­ten and Nar­rat­ed by Ernest Hem­ing­way

Remem­ber­ing Ernest Hem­ing­way, Fifty Years After His Death

Orson Welles’s Last Inter­view, Two Hours Before His Death

Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier, Tweeted Daily By 92nd Street Y

in Music | October 8th, 2012

You’ve no doubt heard of Johann Sebas­t­ian Bach’s The Well-Tem­pered Clavier. What’s more, you’ve no doubt heard it, even if you could swear you haven’t. (Need a refresh­er? Lis­ten to Glenn Gould’s per­for­mance of it here.) If you’d like to gain much more famil­iar­i­ty with this deeply respect­ed piece of music, but in small pieces of it at a time, keep an ear on The Well-Tweet­ed Clavier, going on now from the 92nd Street Y in NYC. Known to pull a cul­tur­al stunt every now and again, 92Y has a plan to tweet about a pre­lude and fugue of The Well-Tem­pered Clavier each and every day. They launched this project on Sep­tem­ber 14, and it should run for a total of 48 days. You can see these tweets by fol­low­ing 92Y on Twit­ter, or sim­ply by check­ing the hash­tag #WTClavier. “The Well-Tem­pered Clavier can be played on any key­board,” 92Y Tweet­ed on Octo­ber 3. “Truth in adver­tis­ing?’ That day, they post­ed three videos asso­ci­at­ed with Pre­lude and Fugue No. 20 in A minor, BWV 865: a two-part per­for­mance and a short talk from pianist and con­duc­tor András Schiff.

At the end of this month, Schiff, famous­ly a boost­er of Bach’s work, opens the New York com­po­nent of his pro­gram The Bach Project, an effort that will, all told, include the San Fran­cis­co Sym­pho­ny, Los Ange­les Phil­har­mon­ic, New York Phil­har­mon­ic, 92nd Street Y, Carnegie Hall and Great Per­form­ers at Lin­coln Cen­ter. “To me, Bach’s music is not black and white; it’s full of colours,” Schiff writes in his essay “With­out the Ped­al But With Plen­ty of Col­ors.” “In my imag­i­na­tion, each tonal­i­ty cor­re­sponds to a colour. The Well-Tem­pered Clavier, with its 24 pre­ludes and fugues in all the major and minor keys, pro­vides an ide­al oppor­tu­ni­ty for this fan­ci­ful fan­ta­sy.” You can explore these col­ors on 92Y’s main Well-Tweet­ed Clavier page, which actu­al­ly col­or-codes all the pre­ludes and fugues thus far tweet­ed so you can expe­ri­ence them as chro­mat­i­cal­ly as Schiff does. “Of course, this is a very per­son­al inter­pre­ta­tion, and each of you may have a dif­fer­ent opin­ion,” he adds. “Nev­er­the­less, if some of us hap­pen to believe that music is more than just a series of notes and sounds, then a lit­tle bit of fan­ta­sy is wel­come.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Open Gold­berg Vari­a­tions: J.S. Bach’s Mas­ter­piece Free to Down­load

A Big Bach Down­load: The Com­plete Organ Works for Free

How a Bach Canon Works. Bril­liant.

A Young Glenn Gould Plays Bach

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Steve Martin, “Home Crafts Expert,” Explains the Art of Paper Wadding, Endorses Bob Kerrey

in Comedy, Current Affairs, Politics | October 8th, 2012

Fed up with polit­i­cal ads? Had enough? Nev­er want to see anoth­er one as long as you live? Con­sid­er watch­ing just one more. Because this one is fun. No, real­ly! Steve Mar­tin, who made prop com­e­dy respectable, endors­es his friend Bob Ker­rey for Nebras­ka Sen­a­tor by pos­ing as a “Home Crafts Expert.” This is the most unob­tru­sive, watch­able piece of polit­i­cal adver­tis­ing I’ve seen, one that trades on what every­one knows to be true—political ads are annoy­ing and dull and politi­cians are not often the most like­able peo­ple. Martin’s ad avoids these pit­falls, and it also makes a very sub­tle point, per­haps with­out even intend­ing to: pol­i­tics is the busi­ness of the every­day (or should be any­way), as essen­tial to us as the com­mon house­hold items we rely on all the time but take for grant­ed.

Now it’s true, of course, not every can­di­date has, or needs, celebri­ty friends. But no mat­ter your pol­i­tics, Martin’s endorse­ment of Ker­rey works as an exam­ple of how polit­i­cal adver­tis­ing could be done dif­fer­ent­ly.

After you’ve watched the ad, you might want to wan­der over to NPR and lis­ten to Mar­tin dis­cuss his 18 years as a stand-up com­ic and his move into act­ing and writ­ing, expe­ri­ences he details in his mem­oir, Born Stand­ing Up.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

Amazon Finally Gets the Kindle Right with the Paperwhite, Delivering on Price and Technology

in Amazon Kindle, e-books, Technology | October 7th, 2012

It took five years and five mod­els, but Ama­zon has final­ly released a new gen­er­a­tion of the Kin­dle — the Kin­dle Paper­white — that deliv­ers the goods. The prob­lem with the pre­vi­ous mod­els boiled down to this. The screens were fair­ly mud­dy. The con­trast, poor. The words did­n’t pop off of the page. If you ever tried read­ing a Kin­dle indoors, espe­cial­ly in low­er light con­di­tions, you know what I mean.

With the Kin­dle Paper­white, Ama­zon has made a pret­ty big leap ahead. They’ve made improve­ments to the font con­trast and screen res­o­lu­tion, which def­i­nite­ly enhance the read­ing expe­ri­ence. They’ve also added a touch­screen to the e‑ink mod­el. But the big stride for­ward is the built-in light that illu­mi­nates the screen. The screen is sidelit, not back­lit (à la the iPad). The point of the light isn’t to make the screen glow like a com­put­er screen. It’s to make the screen stay white, like the page of a book, under vary­ing light con­di­tions. If you move from brighter to dim­mer light­ing con­di­tions, you nudge up the bright­ness so that the page con­tin­ues to look white. And then you stop there.

It all works quite well, until you start read­ing with the Paper­white in pret­ty dim light con­di­tions. Then you’ll need to dial up the light until the screen actu­al­ly glows, and that’s when you’ll start to see some imper­fec­tions in the design. As David Pogue men­tioned in his New York Times review, the Paper­white has some hotspots (areas of uneven light­ing) along the bot­tom of the screen, which detract minor­ly from the read­ing expe­ri­ence.

The last thing Ama­zon got right is the price. The entry mod­el starts at $119, which means that Ama­zon is basi­cal­ly sell­ing the e‑reader at cost, and then mak­ing mon­ey on book sales. But that does­n’t mean that you need to spend very much. You can always down­load texts from our col­lec­tion of 375 Free eBooks. Or, if you’re an Ama­zon Prime Mem­ber, you can bor­row up to 180,000 books for free.

For a com­plete tour of the new Kin­dle, watch this 20 minute video.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load 450 Free Audio Books

Read 160 Free Text­books Online

Down­load a Free Audio Book From Audible.com

How Indie Video Game Makers Are Changing the Game

in Art, Technology, Video Games | October 5th, 2012

In a fol­low-up to its fea­ture on Glitch Art, which we wrote up in August, PBS’s Off Book series has released this short video pro­mot­ing indie video games. The video packs a lot of infor­ma­tion into a very short time frame, so it’s worth watch­ing twice. Over­all, the take­away here is that indie game design­ers can do inno­v­a­tive, quirky things the big guys–the so-called AAA games–can’t, since the indies can fund their own projects through enti­ties like Kick­starter and Indiegogo. It’s a per­sua­sive mes­sage giv­en the amaz­ing vari­ety of sound and vision on dis­play; in sev­en and a half min­utes, we get a glimpse of over two dozen indie games rang­ing from throw­backs to clas­sic 8‑bit ani­ma­tion to gor­geous, painter­ly envi­ron­ments and land­scapes.

The Off Book video breaks its sub­ject into four basic cat­e­gories, each one cov­ered by dif­fer­ent gam­ing jour­nal­ists or game cre­ators: Mechan­ics, Sound, Visu­als, and Sto­ry­telling. The last cat­e­go­ry is par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant since it real­ly is an emo­tion­al engage­ment with a game’s char­ac­ters and plot­lines that push­es peo­ple through the game. At least I can say that’s always been the case for me. My fond­est mem­o­ries of the games I sat up all night with are those that pulled me into a world through, yes, fan­cy graph­ics and com­plex moves, but even more so through nar­ra­tive: from the sim­ple, repet­i­tive tales of the Mega Man series to the glo­be­trot­ting intrigues of Tomb Raider. For some­one who remem­bers the first incar­na­tions of both of those games, it’s excit­ing to see indie game design­ers draw­ing on nostalgia—in graph­ic pre­sen­ta­tion and in the small craft stu­dio pro­duc­tion teams—while also inte­grat­ing con­tem­po­rary sounds and ideas. Like many of their con­tem­po­raries in var­i­ous indie music nich­es, indie game design­ers are push­ing the medi­um for­ward by scal­ing back to basics and by draw­ing on the trea­sures of their past.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.